Amnesty International has condemned a reported Saudi Arabian court ruling that a young man should be paralyzed as punishment for a crime he committed 10 years ago which resulted in the victim being confined to a wheelchair. The London-based human rights group said Ali al-Khawaher, 24, was reported to have spent 10 years in jail waiting to be paralyzed surgically unless his family pays one million Saudi riyals ($270,000) to the victim.
"Paralyzing someone as punishment for a crime would be torture," Ann Harrison, Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa Deputy Director, said in a statement late on Tuesday.
"That such a punishment might be implemented is utterly shocking, even in a context where flogging is frequently imposed as a punishment for some offences, as happens in Saudi Arabia," she added.
A government-approved Saudi human rights group did not respond to requests for comment.
The Arabic-language al-Hayat daily quoted Khawaher's 60-year-old mother as saying her son was a juvenile aged 14 at the time of the offence. She said the victim had demanded 2 million riyals to pardon her son and later reduced this to 1 million. "But we don't have even a tenth of this sum," she said.
Al-Hayat said an unnamed philanthropist was trying to raise funds to pay the blood money, but it was not clear how much time remained before Khawaher's sentence was to be carried out. Amnesty said the case demonstrated the need for Saudi Arabia to review its laws to "start respecting their international obligations and remove these terrible punishments from the law".
Saudi judges have in the past ordered sharia punishments that include tooth extraction, flogging, eye gouging and - in murder cases - death. A little Saudi justice might work well on the new crop of mass killers we seem to be producing.
The man has been in prison for 10 years so obviously he can't make restitution.
ReplyDeleteUnder Saudi law the offended can forgive the crime or seek the same punishment. In this case, the paralyzed man opted for his friend to suffer the same fate. The judge simply upheld current law.
In our country we put people in prison for 10's of years for having drugs in their possession. Judges can not use their discretion when sentencing drug offenders. Our system of laws are just as stupid as other countries.
Imagine being the doctor forced to perform that? And what's the point? Once paralyzed, he won't be paying anyone anything.
People commit crimes in Arab countries the same as they do anywhere else. They commit crimes in states with death penalties the same as they do anywhere else. In frontier days when men were put on a horse and the horse whipped out from under them and hung from a tree, crimes were still committed. Think Jesse James, Billy the Kid...etc.
ReplyDeleteNo. Crime is part of human nature and will always occur everywhere. This is some perversion of what a doctor's role is though. It's straight out of Hitler and the Japanese medical experimentation in World War II. Better to put him in front of a firing squad and shoot him dead.